Larcener sighed, a shockingly human sound. Annoyance. An emotion I’d felt from him quite often. “I keep looking at it,” he said, “trying to find what you see in it.”
I hesitantly stepped up beside him. “The world?”
“It’s broken. Terrible. Horrid.”
“Yeah,” I said softly. “Beautiful.”
He looked at me, narrowing his eyes.
“You’re the source of it all,” I said, resting my fingers on the glass in front of me. “You…all along…The powers you stole from other Epics?”
“I simply took back what I once gave,” he said. “Everyone was so quick to believe in an Epic who could steal abilities, they never realized they’d had it backward. I’m no thief. ‘Larcener,’ they called me. Petty.” He shook his head.
I swallowed, blinking. “Why?” I asked Calamity. “Please, tell me. Why have you done this?”
He mused, hands clasped behind him. It was Larcener. Not only the same face, but the same mannerisms. The same way he sniffed before speaking, as if forming words to speak with me were beneath him.
“You are to destroy yourselves,” he said quietly. “I am but the harbinger; I bring the powers. You use them and orchestrate your own end. It is what we have done in countless realms. I’m…told.”
“You’re told? By who?”
“It is a wonderful place,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. “You wouldn’t be able to comprehend it. Peace. Softness. No terrible lights, no lights at all. We don’t sense with horrid appendages like eyes. We live there, as one, until our duty arrives.” He sneered. “And this is mine. So I came here and left it all. And exchanged it for…”
“Harsh lights,” I said. “Loud sounds. The pain of heat, of sensation.”
“Yes!” he said.
“Those aren’t my nightmares,” I said, raising my hand to my head. “They’re yours. Sparks…they’re all yours, aren’t they?”
“Don’t be foolish. Babbling about your silly notions again.”
I stumbled back, catching myself on a boxy protrusion from the wall. I could see it in my nightmares. Visions of being born in this world, a place so foreign to Calamity. To his senses, a terrible place.
The harsh lights of my nightmares were no more than common ceiling lights.
The clatter and yells? People talking, or the thumps of furniture moving.
The terrible nature of it was all in comparison to where he’d lived before. Another place, one I couldn’t comprehend, one that lacked such intense stimuli.
“Were you supposed to leave us?” I asked.
Calamity didn’t reply.
“Calamity! After you granted our powers, were you supposed to leave?”
“Why would I remain in this terrible place longer than I had to?” he said, dismissive.
“In Megan’s parallel world,” I whispered. “There you did leave, and the darkness never claimed the Epics. Here, you remained…and you infected us somehow. Your hatred, your loathing. You turned each Epic into a copy of you, Calamity.”
Megan had said that her fear of flames hadn’t been nearly as pronounced before her powers arrived. My fear of the depths had started once his eyes turned upon me. Whatever Calamity did, whatever he was, when he wormed his way into someone, he magnified their terrors to an unnatural level.
And when people were exposed to those fears—the things he hated—Calamity withdrew. Gone were the powers, and gone was the darkness.
Confronting the fears, that worked into it too somehow. It had to. When you confronted your fears, what happened?
They are mine, Megan had said. I claim them.
Sparks. Did that mean she had seized the powers and cast out Calamity fully? Separated them from the darkness?
“You all make so many excuses,” Calamity said. “You refuse to see what your people are, once they get a little power.” He looked at me. “What you are, David Charleston. You have hidden it from the others, but you cannot fool the source himself. I know what you are. When will you release it? When will you destroy, as is your destiny?”
“I never will.”
“Nonsense! It is your nature. I’ve seen it over and over again.” He stepped toward me. “How did you do it? How did you hold me off so long?”
“Is that why you came to us?” I asked. “In Ildithia? Because of me?”
Calamity glowered at me. Even now, even seeing him in his glory, I had the same impression of him I’d always had: that of a great spoiled child.
“Calamity,” I said, “you have to go. Leave us.”
He sniffed. “I am not allowed to go until my work is done. They made that clear, after I—”
“What?”
“I do not see you answering the questions I gave you,” he said, then turned back to look out his window. “Why have you denied your powers?”
I licked my lips, heart thumping. “I can’t be an Epic,” I said. “My father was waiting for them….”
“So?”
“I…” I trailed off. I couldn’t voice it.
“Eleven years, and still your kind lingers,” Calamity muttered. “Dwindling, yes, but also lingering. Ten years as a child I lived among you, until I fled to this place.”
That’s when Calamity rose, I thought. When he was ten—and when he decided to start giving away powers.
“This place,” Calamity said, “which is closer to my home than anything else in this rotten realm. But…I found I had to start going down again, among you. I had to know. What did you see in all of this? Eleven years more, and I haven’t been able to find it….”
I looked down at the thin detonator rod still clenched in my hand. I had my answers. They raised more questions, true. What was the place he had come from? Why did his kind seek to destroy us? He acted like it was predetermined, but by who, and why?
Questions I would probably never see answered. My single regret was that I hadn’t said goodbye to Megan. I would have liked one last, farewell kiss.
My name is David Charleston.
I clicked the button.
And I kill Epics.
The bomb detonated.
THE explosion ripped through the glass space station, shattering it to pieces. The heat and force hit me in an instant, then curved around me. It streamed into Calamity’s
outstretched palm, sucked like water through a straw.
It was over in an eyeblink. Behind me, the station reknit itself, glass forming back together, resealing.
I stood like an idiot, clicking the button again and again.
“You thought,” Calamity said without looking at me, “that my own power could destroy me? I suppose there would be a poetry to that. But I am master of the powers, David. I know them all, in their intricacy. Yes, I could tell you how Ildithia works. Yes, I could explain what Megan does in jumping to other realms—both core possibilities and ones ephemeral. But I am truly immortal. None of the powers could harm me, not permanently.”
I sank to the floor. The strain of it all overwhelmed me. The fight with Prof. Being stolen away by Obliteration. Pressing that button and being prepared to die.
“I’ve wondered if I should simply tell them,” Calamity mused, and turned to me. “You should understand that you need to destroy yourselves. But you see, I am not supposed to interfere. Even the small infractions—like being forced to make devices for your assault on Sharp Tower—worry me. It is against our way, though maintaining my cover required it.”
“Calamity, you’re already interfering. Deeply. You make them go mad! You make them destroy!”
He ignored me.
Sparks…how could I get him to see? How could I show him that he was causing the darkness and destruction, that men wouldn’t take to it as naturally as he claimed?
“You are worthless, as a whole,” he said softly. “You will destroy yourselves, and I will bear witness. I will not shirk my duty as others have. We are to watch, as is our calling. But I must not interfere, not again. The acts of youth can be forgiven. Though I was never truly a child, I was new. And your world is a shock. A dreadful shock.” He nodded, as if convincing himself.
I forced myself to stand. Then I slipped my gun from its holster on my leg.
“Your answer to everything, David Charleston?” Calamity said with a sigh.
“Worth a try,” I said, raising the gun.
“I contain the very powers of the universe. Do you understand that? They are all mine. I am what you call a High Epic a thousand times over.”